I'm really happy with the progress of War Worlds so far. People seem to be enjoying themselves, which gives me a fantastic feeling! Thanks everyone for the support so far!

So today, I thought I'd just take a few minutes to talk about some of the short- and medium- term plans for the game so far. I don't want to have too much set "in stone" because I want to see how people are playing the game and the sorts of strategies that emerge as we progress. But I do have some plans for features and functionality at least to keep me busy for the next few months.

Short-term

Some of things I'm planning for the short-term (other than the obvious bug fixes and whatnot) are:

Upgradable Buildings

This has been a pretty common request so far, and it's definitely the next thing I'll be working on. Particularly when you look at some of the more exotic planet types (radiated, asteroids, etc) they'll typically have quite high mining scores, but low population scores. So that means you'll want to have a fully-upgraded biosphere on there to take full advantage of the mining.

Beacon

This was suggested in the Google+ community, and I really like it. Basically, you can build one of these and on the starfield view there'll be a constant pointer pointing back to your beacon, so as you scroll around you'll never get lost. Perhaps even a quick-tap to get back to your homeworld.

This would probably also require the ability to destroy, or "sell" buildings, so that you can build the beacon on another star as you expand.

Transport Ships

This was another suggestion from the Google+ community. These would allow you to transport goods (food and minerals) between stars. This way, if you're building something that requires a lot of minerals you can enlist the help of other stars.

Research Labs that do something

I put the "research lab" in the game not long before I initially released it, and they don't actually do anything currently. I'm thinking a research lab could be used to unlock higher levels of biosphere, higher levels of ships and so on.

Medium-term

And in the more medium term (so within the next couple of months), I'm hoping to do some or all of the following:

Alliances and Factions

The ability to form an alliance with other players. I was thinking of two kinds of alliances, first would be just simple one-on-one alliances between your neighbours where you agree not to attack each other for whatever reason. There could be additional benefits from forming alliances like this, such as the ability to see each other's scout reports and a private chat channel as well.

The other would be the ability to form factions which consit of many players. You'd be able to belong to whatever alliances you'd like (between factions or within factions or whatever you like) but you'd only be able to belong to a single faction. We could then have a global ranking of factions (and players) based on things like total cash, total number of ships, number of stars/planets colonized and so on.

Marketplace

Somewhere where you can trade ships and equipment. This could be a good way to get some quick cash before launching a big assault, or perhaps as a way to calling in backup in case you're attacked. The mechanics haven't been worked out, exactly, but I'm open to ideas!

And then?

I don't want to try and think too far into the future here. I want to make sure the game is evolving based on how people are actually playing it and so I like to keep my options.

At some point, I will want to start advertising the game more widely. I'm totally stoked by the reception it's had so far, but the only place I've mentioned the game is on Reddit's r/indiegaming, so there's plenty of scope for more there.